31 Flavors of Performance
Readiness: The Real Job of Strength and Conditioning Professionals
Ice Cream Paint Job
I've been the in the health and performance field for a little while now, around 23 years in all. Experiencing both the return to play and strength and conditioning side of the house has taught me quite a bit but one lesson sticks out to this day: The things I added to the table didn't have much direct influence on the athlete's ability to perform on the given day.
The majority of my career I've worked with people in tactical professions and I can honestly say that a powerlifting versus kettlebell centric program made the slightest bit of measurable difference when it came to winning battles, catching bad guys, or putting out fires. Where it may have had some effect is the total cost in health dollars that accrued over the course of an individual's service. That said, how any program is applied probably matters more than anything else.
Performance is a multifactorial game and the first factor is choosing the right parents. Next are probably personality factors and then sports skill acquisition. Last and bottom of the barrel least when it comes to direct transfer to performance is lowly strength and conditioning. Weight rooms and training facilities everywhere make attempts to simulate the demands of a given sport as a way of increasing preparedness and providing a direct transfer to the given performance outcomes of a given endeavor. But in my opinion, that's the wrong framework from go.
When it comes to the job of the professional systems that support athletes those in the medical and strength and conditioning aspects of the team, performance longevity should be the primary objective. Yes, there are of course corollary attributes that can be measure in a laboratory but few that can ultimately predict who wins.
As a brief aside, if you're not in the sports performance game there will be a bow tied on all of this at the end that will make things relevant to the general public. Performance longevity and how we achieve it is important for everybody.
Get Ready
Having performance longevity as a North Star for human performance professionals helps to keep us humble in our perception about our contribution to the end state of game day. One thing that has been incredibly helpful for me is utilizing the framework of Preparedness and Readiness. I'm uncertain of the exact origins of these terms regarding their use in the human performance arena but I originally heard them via the work of Dr. Roman Fomin (UFC Performance Institute) and Val Nadeskin (OmegaWave) both of whom are pioneers in the use of Heart Rate Variability for measuring total stress load and adaptability in athletes. Preparedness refers to the necessary components of sports mastery including necessary skill, technics, and tactics required to be successful in a given endeavor. Readiness is comprised of an athlete's sum physiological and psychological stress load which together determine adaptability.
Historically, the vast majority of emphasis has been put on develop sport specific skillsets and pounding training load into athletes. As such coaches love to argue with each other about the transferability of their particular flavor of exercise is better than the others. In some cases it leads to interesting lines of thought and research that force us to better evaluate our practices and if they are serving the outcomes we've set out to achieve or at least not doing harm. Fair enough. Most of the time however, attempts to somehow mimic sporting environments result in some of the most campy, silly, ill informed goofiness that social media has to offer.
Energy to that end is often wasted because trying to mimic the sporting environment is well, impossible, because it's not the actual environment. With that said, I don't mean that exercise selection doesn't matter or that we shouldn't consider transferability. Not at all. What I am saying is that the primary job of the formal training environment is to generate broad robustness and adaptability. Or as we discussed earlier - readiness. Improving the overall action capabilities of the athlete while also not making them more vulnerable to further insult in the future.
31 Flavors
Like everything else humans are involved in, the world of sports performance can get pretty tribey (tribe-ish?). Everybody thinks that their favorite flavor of ice cream is the best one and all the other ones are essentially versions of baby shit. There are of course fundamental invariants that exist in every training program but the details of application are more art than science.
I'm not at all saying that evidence based approaches aren't important but it is also important to remember that an absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. Sound scientific principles are of course the bedrock of performance (do I have to say it a different way?). The exact way in which they are expressed by professionals or how attractive they might be to athletes has as much to do with personality than any other factor. In other words, we all like ice cream just stop trying to make me lick your cone.
At the end of the day. Lots of approaches "work" at making humans more robust and less fragile. Major factors include:
What does the athlete(s) enjoy? Regular execution of any training program is where the Melange lies. But if you're athletes won't show up to the training room, who cares?
Is this stressor absolutely necessary? I feel dumb typing that but I can't tell you how many times I've seen additional t-spine stress being put on veteran special warfare operators who in case you're unfamiliar with that community have dumpster fires for upper backs and necks.
What is the total context in which this training load is being applied? This is a human being and not an exercise robot. All stress pulls water from the same well. As much as it pains me to admit it, the gym is not the center of the universe.
Does this approach provide action potential that better prepare them for the unpredictability of sport? There are of course sets of data for what occurs in various sporting environments that should be taken into consideration by athletes with options often fair better when it comes to the X factor in the chaos of the moment.
Does the applied system offer a formal movement language that provides athletes with function checks that are indicators for how they're doing? Compensation is insidious and it's manageable until it isn't. No need to change the batteries in the smoke alarm after the house burns down.
Probably then we all might ride horses that are just a little bit shorter when it comes to the effect that our awesome program is having on an athlete. Plenty of athletes have been successful in spite of shitty strength and conditioning programs but perhaps they could have been successful a bit longer or not have paid as steep of a physiological price for that success. Remember the wise words of Obi Wan Kenobi, "Only Sith speak in absolutes."
Thinking Forward
Performance longevity offers coaches, athletes, and really anybody who wants to use and organized approach to readiness a more precise lens through which examine their choices when it comes to what program to select. It gives us far more depth and breadth with which select appropriate menu items.
Performance longevity forces us to think in terms of not only the cost of today and tomorrow's performance, but also what choices can be made that will keep us in the field of play long enough to make use of the experience (Preparedness) we've accumulated and the skills we've developed.
I've seen many many skilled people who could no longer express that skill because they broke their physiology unnecessarily.
The Rest of Us
So what does this have to do with the rest of us? I'm not an elite athlete. Never have been. I do however want to perform my very best for as long as I possibly can. I imagine if you're interested in reading this Substack you're probably at least into recreational sports or at least have some focus on maintaining your health. You might even be a "former athlete". With that in mind I think there's a lesson for us all hidden beneath this curious dilemma in sports.
That is, there isn't any secret squirrel program out there. There's just not. If you're looking to find the very best version of yourself so that you can keep playing pickleball, rolling on the jiu jitsu mat with your buddies, or exploring interesting hikes with your sweetheart then it's also pretty simple business.
Find an organized approach to movement. Do it with focus and consistency. Keep it in context of what it is you actually what you want to achieve and be crystal clear about that.
Don't forget that the job of any training program or exercise regimen is not to rule you. It's to provide a foundation of health and strength that keeps you adaptable for the long run.
Stay ready.
Thanks for reading,
Rob
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